Explaining inconsistencies - my ripples effect theory

Discussion in 'Star Trek Movies: Kelvin Universe' started by jackoverfull, Sep 21, 2020.

  1. jackoverfull

    jackoverfull Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    As mentioned plenty of times over the years, the Kelvin Timeline seem to sport a lot of differences from the prime one already before Nero’s arrival. A few years ago Simon Pegg commented that the changes actually expanded in the past as well, in what he called the “ripples effect”, so the further in the past you got the less the differences between the two timelines would be.

    This is a theory i came up some time ago to explain how such a ripples effect would work in practice.


    Thing is: we tend to consider time travel too linearly while in fact
    it’s full of intermingled events. The Kelvin being destroyed meant that
    what we see in TOS, TNG and so on didn’t happen or happened differently,
    but therefore there are /more time travel events/ that we see in those
    series (and others we don’t see, presumably) that don’t happen or happen
    differently as well, having different consequences on the past than in
    the original timeline, leaving the abramsverse different than we expect
    even before Nero’s incursion.

    Let’s make a couple of examples…

    If Star Trek IV doesn’t happen, Scotty doesn’t reveal the formula for
    transparent aluminum to Dr. Nichols. Instead, transparent aluminum is
    discovered by another person a few years down the road, who follows a
    completely different marketing strategy for the new material, leading to
    a much more widespread use. The new material is used extensively in
    construction, leading to the giant skyscrapers we see in the new
    timeline, and when Starfleet starts building their fleet they use it
    much more than in the original timeline, adding windows, most notably
    the one on the bridges. Also, the experience Earth engineers had in
    building giant structures on the surface makes it thinkable to build
    even starships on the ground, at least occasionally.

    In the same movie, Gillian Taylor is removed from the 20th century. If
    this doesn’t happen, she might eventually have children there with
    someone and one of her descendants could be a strong detractor of the
    Constitution project, leading to the Enterprise being built later than
    in the original timeline.

    As you can see it’s possible to justify virtually any inconsistency this
    way, from the looks of the uniforms to Checkov’s age.
    This theory also kinda invalidates the idea that Enterprise happened in
    the Kelvinverse /as we saw it/. If we follow it it’s implied that while
    Enterprise happened mostly as we know it would have at very least looked
    different, perhaps with a bridge window and so on.
    The theory also has brainwrecking consequences on time travel as we know
    it, but those can be explained as well. For examples: does my first
    example mean that Scotty came back to the twenty-third century
    discovering that bridge windows aren’t a thing while they were before he
    changed the past? This can be explained with the change always having
    been part of the timeline, the old good predestination paradox.

    The single, most glaring, problem with the Kelvin timeline becomes how
    can it exist without overwriting the original one, as per official
    statements. This is something my theory can’t address, but I guess it
    could be explained in other ways
     
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  2. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Since 2017 CBS essentially rebooted the TOS Prime Universe era with a new Kelvin-inspired look and advanced Nemesis-era technology. I thought the days of trying to reconcile any of this was long over.

    Or maybe I've just given up:shrug:
     
    Last edited: Sep 22, 2020
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  3. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Since I treat time travel as pure BS any way I always treated the Kelvin as a branching event from the Prime Timeline. In other words, the Prime USS KELVIN was enroute home and arrived at Earth, allowing Kirk to be born in Iowa per the Prime Timeline. While the Kelvin universe branched off, like in Parallels.

    In the Kelvin Universe the attack basically caused Starfleet to become far more protectionist in its stance, and created an arm race of sorts between them and the Klingons, without direct conflict. Basically, both the Klingons and Starfleet were busy analyzing the Narada for future weapon development and protection. Because of this, the Enterprise is launched later, because it is designed to confront the Narada as a threat, based upon scans taken from the Kelvin's encounter.

    The Klingons, meanwhile, are also far more isolated, either because they view the Romulans as more of a threat due to capturing the Narada, or the Great Houses are willing to work together to perfect this weapon to allow them domination in the region.

    But, Nero's own attack basically renders them pretty much as equals due to destroying multiple ships in his escape and attack.

    Now, as to your other points, yeah, we're obviously going to have different time travel shenanigans, since Kirk and company may or may not go back in time. So, transparent aluminum gets invented and the whales still go extinct. Meaning that we could potentially still see the whale probe in the Kelvin universe.
     
    Last edited: Sep 21, 2020
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  4. jackoverfull

    jackoverfull Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    this is unfortunately true and still unexplained, my theory doesn’t take discovery in account yet.
     
  5. Charles Phipps

    Charles Phipps Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Simon Pegg is such a trekkie he knows that a nonsensical explanation spoken with conviction is better than a genuine one.
     
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  6. M'Sharak

    M'Sharak Definitely Herbert. Maybe. Moderator

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  7. jackoverfull

    jackoverfull Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    But actually makes a lot of sense to me: if you change the future you also change the parts of your past that were changed by the future you just changed.
     
  8. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    No, since the original future remains intact. Both are possible futures.

    Meaning: As of 2233, when the divergence occurs, both Prime and Kelvin timelines exist. It's like a fork in the road - you take one, but the other is still there. And any time travel that comes from either of these futures, can and will still occur.

    For example, even though "City on the Edge of Forever" takes place in the prime timeline, it still occurs, and will still affect the past pre-2233. So, since the Kelvin timeline exists AFTER 2233, it will be affected as well.

    And any of the Kelvin crew can travel back before 2233 and still see Data's head under San Francisco...hell, we could even have prime and Kelvin versions of the same people meet each other if they go back before the divergence.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2021
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  9. jackoverfull

    jackoverfull Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    This is an interpretation, but not necessarily the only one (and not the one implied by Pegg). Since we're talking about a so far probably fictional branch of science there isn’t necessarily a right one.
     
  10. Mr. Laser Beam

    Mr. Laser Beam Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Since he's not writing ST4, what does it matter what he thinks? :shrug:
     
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  11. yotsuya

    yotsuya Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I used to imagine only two results from time travel. The one is neat and tidy. You cannot change the past. Any actions you take in the past were already taken in your present. So things cannot cannot change. I like this one. The other is that you can change anything because any change creates a branch in the timeline and you were from the original and create the new one. But lately I've seen a third. I call it a loop. You go back and change something and it creates a loop. If the loop can lead to events that can change your timeline. It is a branch, but you can go back and fix things. This is Back to the Future II. Biff goes back and changes the past and Emmet and Marty are not affected, but the world around them is. They then go back and fix things and close the loop, restoring the future. You could just say this is a branch and then another branch, but they way they travel though it indicates a loop.

    My take on Star Trek is that the Prime timeline is the first. None of the time travel events changes the past. The one that does is reset, which would be another type of loop. But the end result is static. So none of the time travel events we see do anything to the timeline leading up to them. With the ease of moving to the mirror universe, my take on the events of the Kelvin timeline is that Spock went back in time and into a parallel universe. This explains the differences between the unchanged timeline and the prime timeline. The Kelvin is too big and its registry has a leading 0 for no reason. The uniforms don't align with Discovery. And the biggest reason to me it is a parallel dimension is that Spock does not make use of any of the other ways of fixing the past that are open to him. He accepts it. As I have been doing a rewatch of TOS, that Spock would stop at nothing to fix a broken timeline, Especially one that destroyed Vulcan. But if he realized he was in a parallel dimension, he becomes and observer. Khan no longer has to be the same person (a brown skinned Asian) and he can be a white looking Asian (Pakistan is full of them). If it started off as a parallel universe then we don't have to reconcile Spock's inaction or the weird changes. Similarly with Discovery, which already is tied to a Mirror Universe, would be a third universe. We can assume in this one that things are mostly according to the prime timeline, but not the finer points. So we can ignore the differences and TOS remains untouched.

    nd one source for some of these other parallel universes could be time travel. The universe in Mirror MIrror could be the one where Edith Keeler lived. Or that could be In A Mirror Darkly. Or that would could be yet another one. They went into Earth's past 4 times. How many branches might they have created? Could they still go forward in their own? I prefer to think that some of these existed for other reasons and none of the missions to the past created any branches. But the ability to move from one to the other as in Mirror Mirror and The Tholian Web poses the idea that they existed all along and that you can navigate between them. So you could have Shatner and Pine in the same movie like the two Spocks. In some universe Kirk lived.

    For me this renders any differences between the three obviously different universes completely acceptable. And you can take this and expand it. Maybe for some Enterprise and/or TOS need to be the ones that are in a different universe. I can see for some it might work better to move TOS to its own universe and have Discovery be the same as the movies, TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Picard. But it lets each series potentially be a soft reboot. For me, all the series from TOS through Enterprise were one universe. That is me. That is how I look at it. And I have not seen all of Enterprise. Maybe some of their time travel resulted in both the early Kelvin and the Discovery universes.
     
  12. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    TOS is really the only one I have a hard time placing. So, I take GR's view that TOS was a dramatic recreation of Kirk's missions and that any inconsistencies in tech or whatnot is due to classified tech or limits in in-universe production.

    The USS KELVIN flows just fine from ENT to DSC and bridges that gap just fine for me.

    Also, I think that Spock didn't feel the need to change it because it was a quantum branching event rather than existing in the same timeline.
     
  13. jackoverfull

    jackoverfull Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    This interview came some time after Beyond. Nobody mentioned ST14 here.

    All these changes are quite explainable using the above ripples theory as well, though, without the need of resorting to parallel universes.

    About Spock, what could he do to fix the timeline, realistically?

    Even if he brought back the JJ enterprise to the moment Nero arrived there was no guarantee they would be able to stop the Narada and even if they did that two future vessels fighting each other in front of the Kelvin would still end up having unknown effects on the timeline.

    The only way to fix things would have been preventing Nero from traveling back in time, but that’s not possible because it happens in the future of another timeline.
     
  14. jackoverfull

    jackoverfull Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Also, the multiple universes idea has a huge issue for me: all universes are not created at the moment of the temporal incursion, but always existed, being identical up o the moment of the fork, otherwise the time traveler would not have a way to go back to his present instead of an infinite number of different ones, which would work fine for me if it weren’t that we end up with the time travel conundrum that led me to the ripples theory.

    Basically: how can two universes be identical but still allow from incursions from different universes?

    Let’s take the Kelvinverse: is it identical to the prime timeline? Does it contain Picard in the 19th century and Scotty messing with Plexicorp? If yes, how did they get there and where did they go? They automatically went back to their own universe “somehow”? Did they just vanish?

    Let’s imagine the whales probe shows up in the Kelvin universe and things play out similarly to Prime, will Kelvin Scotty bump onto Prime Scotty?

    If we accept that the past is necessarily identical, including all the time travel incursions from *all* the future forks, we get this kind of absurd situations.

    For what’s worth, if we assume time is infinite and go the Einsenberg route that whatever can happen will happen in parallel universes but still keep them linked together up to the point they fork we really got no past at all, as it would be incredibly polluted by an infinite number of time travelers from parallel futures.
     
  15. Tenacity

    Tenacity Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The crew from the Abrams universe could have gone to Hawaii instead of the California coast to obtain humpback whales. Never would has been close to meeting.
     
  16. fireproof78

    fireproof78 Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Well, yeah. But there's not guarantee that each time traveler will go back to the same moment in the past. A shard past doesn't automatically mean that people who travel to it will run in to each other. It's a big planet, no matter how Trek likes to paint it.
     
  17. Dukhat

    Dukhat Admiral Admiral

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    If every inconsistency in Star Trek was because of a time travel incident, there would be a billion time travel incidents.

    [​IMG]
     
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  18. Charles Phipps

    Charles Phipps Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The obvious answer is it's a parallel universe with slight differences even from the beginning but THIS MEANS ITS NOT A SPIN OFF TIMELINE!

    And that would be SHOCKING.
     
  19. STEPhon IT

    STEPhon IT Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I wish CBS never invited this non-sense of Prime and Kelvin since none of it matters when it comes to TOS or it's legacy. JJ Abrams made a movie which simply updated Star Trek for the general audiences to watch the movie and don't have to do any useless homework to enjoy the genre. A few bits and pieces were to indicate he's not destroying what was done before but honoring it and now we can move on, but the fucking canon disciples couldn't resist and have to separate them to say one is real and the other is... well...

    The fact of the matter is the so-called "prime" is not and will never be connected to TOS, the styles and the format is completely different and doesn't even try to make it compatible to TOS. I mean even PICARD has made some slick modification of his Enterprise; it's slight, but it's not the Enterprise from TNG.
     
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  20. jackoverfull

    jackoverfull Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    But this is precisely my point: with an *infinite* number of futures to draw on, a billion of incidents is a ridiculously low number. Sooner or later two time travelers from different timelines are bound to bump into each other. This is precisely why the “identical until the fork, but containing all possible time travel” approach can’t work: the past would be so polluted by time travel that it would not make any sense at all.


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